Jelly Beans Creative Learning

Mpls St. Paul Magazine, October 2001

She wasn't even sure the car had hit her. On the concrete and crying in the middle of the Wall Street district of New York City, Wendy Muhlhauser only knew something was wrong with her head.

She realized in the hospital that the car had hit her and a few days later that the driver was uninsured.

It was 1992 and Muhlhauser was living her New York City acting dream.

By then the injury was causing her tremendous vertigo, head pain and frequent fainting and she was having trouble reading and writing.

The acting dream started to dissipate. "Everything fell," she says. "A Management company wanted to send me out on auditions. I could barely function."

Muhlhauser moved to Minneapolis to be closer to family and find a good doctor. It was a neurologist in Fargo who finally began talking to her about Brain Injury and Post Concussive syndrome.

She struggled with how to rebuild her life. "Before the brain injury, I wanted commercial success," she says. "After the brain injury I just wanted to do what I love."

A short stint working in Children's theatre reminded Muhlhauser of what she did love-creativity and dramatics. When she developed a curriculum to teach children about drama, her passion increased. In 1996, four years after her injury she started her own business, Jelly Beans Creative Learning, to teach drama to children and to help teachers and other early-childhood professionals learn how drama can be an effective classroom tool, especially for social and emotional development. "I'm dedicated to helping kids learn how to think-to figure things out," she says. "It's a life skill." A skill, she adds, that she values much more since her injury.